You're listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Today is Thursday, March 5th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria. Howdy? And Jayne Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy?

And Jaynevella.

Hey, guys.

Evan is out this week because the schedule was not flexed one up because of this whole, you know, taxes. The work situation? Yeah. Sneat deep in taxes. Yeah, he's always so railed, you know, at this time of year. I feel bad for him because it is like a slow death.

It's a slow death until the end happens. When's the last date? I always forget that. April 15th, usually. Sometimes it's like weirdly a day or two different. It's like the first Monday closest to the April 15th or whatever. It can't fall on a Sunday, right? Oh, right, right, right. So Jay, yeah. I know we've been talking about Artemis a lot, so I'm sure you've heard that Artemis 3 is no longer going to land on the moon. Yeah, we've got to talk about this. I mean, first of all, they figured out what was wrong with Artemis 2. They moved it to April of this year. The bottom line is that they found out that there was a helium flow interruption.

And that, of course, is not good. That helium, for my understanding, the helium is what they pump in, when they're using the rocket fuel, they're pumping in the helium to take up that

empty space. And I think it balances the pressure and all that.

Very, very important to pressurize those tanks and make sure everything is flowing at the,

at the speeds and everything that they want.

And without that working perfectly, you know, who knows what the result could have been,

you know, it could have been fatal, you know, and that's what all of this worry is about.

They want to make sure that nobody dies and there's no explosions, you know, the basics, right?

It was a non-trivial fix, but it didn't require a major redesign, which is fine.

You know, like it's okay to have delays and it's all part of the system.

We'll talk about delays.

So Artemis 3 is no longer scheduled to land on the moon.

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